LIBOR-gate Comes To Crude: Total Exposes Price Fixing In The Energy Market

While the recent revelations of multi-year LIBOR manipulation (but, but how was that possible: it involved thousands of people, operating for years, manipulating numbers – all the traditional reasons presented against conspiracy theory crackpots alleging that manipulation may be going on here, or there, or at the BLS, or somewhere), which we had said had been happening for the past 3 years, confirmed that the entire rate-based derivative market was a giant scam, at least one market spared from cartel whistleblower, i.e., insider, humiliation, was the commodities market. No longer. As the FT first reported, a Swiss trading office of Total Oil Trading sent a response letter to IOSCO (the International Organization of Securities Commissions), alleging that the same kinds of market “pricing” shennanigans that have been now exposed to have taken place over bottles of Bollinger, may have been pervasive in the crude market as well.

From the letter which may have set off the same avalanche in the energy markets as the Barclays “settlement” did for rates: